Interesting speculation here.
Putin is well knows for provocations in which we would kill Russians in a false flag operation to start a new war.
Quote:
Ukraine's security chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said that Kremlin-backed separatists on July 17 intended to shoot down a Russian passenger plane to give Moscow a pretext for conventionally invading Ukraine.
At an Aug. 7 briefing in Kyiv, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine alleged that Aeroflot Flight 2074, flying to Larnaca in Cyprus from Moscow, was the target, not the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, where 298 people were killed in the shoot-down from a ground-to-air missile.
He aid both passenger jets were flying at similar altitudes and speed, and located in close proximity to each other above Donetsk Oblast during that fateful day. The Malaysian aircraft was flying at an altitude of 10,100 meters and a speed of 909 kilometers per hour and the Russian one at 10,600 meters at a speed of 768 kilometers per hour.
The map screenshot depicting the transportation route of the Buk missile on July 17.
Apparently, separatists also confused the names of two identically named cities, presumably because of their Russian origin. There are two cities named Pervomayske located in Donetsk Oblast and separatists mixed them up. So instead of carrying the Russian-supplied Buk missile to west from Donetsk, they took it in the opposite direction, to the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts border.
If the Kremlin-backed insurgents had struck the Russian aircraft, it could have landed in territory controlled by the Ukrainian military, allowing Russia to accuse the Ukrainian government and create a pretext for the overt Russian military invasion of the east.
The intelligence service says that Russian armed forces had been planning to invade Ukraine on July 18. The Russian side had been conducting an informational campaign for such an event for several days before, with Russian news media massively spreading information that the Ukrainian side was shelling the Russian Federation.
https://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine...ane-359765.html